JMP> Why have a Job State Table ?

JMP> Why have a Job State Table ?

JK Martin jkm at underscore.com
Wed May 7 14:46:15 EDT 1997


Harry,


As you know all too well, I'm in general agreement with the overall
nature of your message.


It was hard for me to tell, based on your text, whether you were
proposing that some of the defined attributes should be removed.
Is this the case?  Or were you suggesting those attributes should
be placed in a new "home" (ie, somewhere else in the MIB)?




> D    sheetsCompleted 54
> D    sheetsCompletedCurrentCopy 54
> D    mediumConsumedName 55
> D    colorantConsumedIndex 55
> D    colorantConsumedName 55
> D    jobProcessingCPUTime 57
> 
> Category X - "Who needs this Anyway"


I believe *some* of these attributes are very useful:


  sheetsCompleted
	Perhaps the only meaningful value to the end-user in terms of
	estimating when the job will finish, given that client software
	sending the job to the printer often has no idea of the total
	sheets to be printed.  (This value reflects the *total* sheets
	printed for job thus far, right?)


  mediumConsumedName
	For accounting purposes, this may be the most processable element
	to account for media costs/planning.  Consider the infamous PWG
	example of "Hillary's pink letterhead"; even though the media size
	may be Letter, the cost of this media may very well be higher than
	plain old 20-pound Letter copier paper.


  jobProcessingCPUTime
	One of my personal favorites.  A 20-sheet job from a software
	engineering department is usually quite a bit different from
	a 20-page job from a Graphic Arts department.  When it comes to
	capacity planning purposes, this value can be extremely useful
	in determining resource requirements based on application usage.


When I step back and look what I've just written, it occurs to me that
one of the biggest problems I have with the Job MIB draft is that it
provides a plethora of descriptive text telling the reader WHAT the object
is...yet very seldom tells the reader WHY it's important, or HOW it can
be used to solve common critical problems.  (Or is such knowledge considered
to be a "proprietary advantage" by some?)




> D    jobCopiesCompleted 49
> D    impressionsCompletedCurrentCopy 53
> 
> The StateValue for printing that I had defined was CurrentCopy. Somehow,
> it got changed in your MIB to impressionsRequested... which is a STATIC
> attribute.


This kind of situation happens all too frequently, IMHO.  It has also
caused significant delay in progressing this effort, while others in
the group "discover" such changes in the text.  Let us NOT DO THIS anymore.


By the way, I'm still hoping to see a simple summary of minimum
conformance  published, whereby all mandatory items can be identified
so as to give us an idea of the level of effort to develop a minimum
conforming implementation.


	...jay



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